911 was an inside job

Alex Jones. Rachel Maddow brought up infowars, the false flag, government destruction theories being pushed by InfoWars and its star figure, Alex Jones. You remember Alex Jones, the crazy guy who went ballistic on Piers Morgan? Well, he’s been out in full force again, but this time it’s coupled with an endorsement by none other than Matt Drudge.

911 conspiracy false flag inside job

Maddow pointed out that Drudge isn’t just some fringe guy, he’s in charge of perhaps the most influential conservative website on the internet. Maddow made it clear that Jones is just nuts, showing a clip of Jones touting a bizarre NASA conspiracy involving multitudes of dead astronauts. But the madness is not just limited to Jones, and Maddow showed off the ramblings of one Republican New Hampshire state representative who posted a link to Jones’ conspiracy on Glenn Beck’s Facebook page. This is an elected official who thinks it’s worth asking if the government bombed Boston.

Thanks to the power of the web and live broadcasts on television, the conspiracy theories surrounding the events of 9/11 – when terrorists attacked the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington – have surpassed those of Roswell and JFK in traction. Despite repeated claims by al-Qaeda that it planned, organised and orchestrated the attacks, several official and unofficial investigations into the collapse of the Twin Towers which concluded that structural failure was responsible and footage of the events themselves, the conspiracy theories continue to grow in strength.

At the milder end of the spectrum are the theorists who believe that the US government had prior warning of the attacks but did not do enough to stop them. Others believe that the Bush administration deliberately turned a blind eye to those warnings because it wanted a pretext to launch wars in the Middle East to usher in another century of American hegemony. A large group of people – collectively called the 9/11 Truth Movement – cite evidence that an airliner did not hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Centre could not have been brought down by airliner impacts and burning aviation fuel alone. This final group points to video evidence which they claim shows puffs of smoke – so-called demoliton squibs – emerging from the Twin Towers at levels far below the aircraft impact zones and prior to the collapses. They also believe that, on the day itself, the US air force was deliberately stood down or sent on exercises to prevent intervention that could have saved the lives of nearly 3,000 people.
Many witnesses – including firemen, policemen and people who were inside the towers at the time – claim to have heard explosions below the aircraft impacts (including in basement levels) and before both the collapses and the attacks themselves. As with the assassination of JFK, the official inquiry into the events – the 9/11 Commission Report – is widely derided by the conspiracy community and held up as further evidence that 9/11 was an “inside job”. Scientific journals have consistently rejected these hypotheses.

But if that wasn’t enough, four Republican congressmen wrote a letter to Homeland Security to request they investigate what basically amounts to another conspiracy theory. Maddow said conservatives have always had to deal with this sort of thing, but now it’s slowly seeping into more mainstream outlets. She said, “The American right, right now, is embracing this stuff way more overtly than they have in the past.”

Maddow linked this to conservative media outlets, particularly Fox News, “calling for Americans to blame… [and] suspect all Muslims” in the wake of Boston, and said conservative media has now descended to a new low.